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‘Nothing is changing’ — Reddit is denying a report from The Washington Post that it might force users to log in to see content if it can’t reach deals with AI companies

‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google

https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/20/23925504/reddit-deny-force-log-in-see-posts-ai-companies-deals

Reddit is apparently seeking to strike deals with big AI companies.

‘Reddit can survive without search’: company reportedly threatens to block Google

‘Nothing is changing’ — Reddit is denying a report from The Washington Post that it might force users to log in to see content if it can’t reach deals with AI companies::Reddit initially denied a report from The Washington Post that it might force users to log in to see content. However, the Post says it may still block search crawlers, and Reddit didn’t deny to The Verge that it may do so.

64 comments

killeronthecorner

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Nothing is changing says company that keeps changing everything

BaronVonBort

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After saying they won’t

ZeroCool

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Yeah, Reddit lies constantly. About everything. I guarantee they just weren’t ready to announce this yet but they will by the end of the year. It’s not the first time they’ve pulled this routine.

Tygr

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If they haven’t reached deals with AI companies by limiting the API, then why haven’t they returned access to third party app developers? They obviously see how far their engagement and quality has dropped.

I won’t use their official app, ever.

PlexSheep

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Even if they return to the old standard, they have shown to be too unreliable and ready for scummy corporate decisions.

OrteilGenou

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I have an account for hockey. Laptop only via Firefox, eat my donkey spez

WindowsEnjoyer

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It's fine for porn tho

spark947

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I have never understood this reasoning. Obviously the few determined actors for training data will just start scraping for content.

AlmightySnoo

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Didn't Steve Huffman praise Elon Musk and say that his handling of Twitter was an example for him? Perfectly natural for him to think it would somehow be a good idea to make account creation mandatory on Reddit.

salton

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Psythik

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The little bug-eyed, recessed-chin pedophile is so out of touch.

xenomor

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Narwhal just went behind the paywhal for me to today. So, I guess I’m finally done with Reddit now? I’ve been in there at least 14 years. It’s just wild to me that I lost Twitter and Reddit after so much time.

wreckedcarzz

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I still use RedReader for general stuff, and rss feeds of subs for porn, and I'll check the bird once a week for people I follow for the same reason. But for reddit, my few hours a day has become a fraction, and even a decent amount of the people I watch on both platforms are either shifting elsewhere (yay) or just closing up shop (very not yay).

I was ~11 years in for reddit, and like 9 or so with birdy.

deweydecibel

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I've been using Firefox Nightly with the the old.reddit redirect addon and Ublock. It's not great having to navigate around the desktop site on a mobile screen, but it's better than the app.

glockenspiel

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I’ve noticed that old.reddit.com has a convenient bug where it won’t recognize keystrokes on mobile devices (even forcing desktop version). What a coincidence.

Edit: at least for me on iPhone running the latest OS and my Galaxy Tab Ultra with Chrome, Firefox, and Samsungs Internet (so Chrome again). I assumed this means it happens to others and isn’t limited to just me.

Anyway, glad I’ve severed almost all activity from Reddit. I wish a few niche communities would move over (like Steam Deck, which is really a shadow of its subreddit) but I understand.

guacupado

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I went with Narwhal for a while too. I've been using Lemmy on browser but still ended up on Reddit on mobile because I don't know if Lemmy has any apps. One day I opened up Narwhal with a message about some date it'd end up being paid and I immediately uninstalled. Reddit isn't at all worth paying for as a user. There's literally nothing I've regretted about not going on Reddit; Lemmy still has plenty of pages of content to mindlessly scroll through.

LooseSeal

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Heaps of reddit app ports are on Lemmy. Not sure about iOS, but on Android there is sync and boost which we're two of the bigger ones.

If Relay came to Lemmy I would happily pay $ to access.

glockenspiel

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For iOS: I fully recommend Thunder or Memmy. Very complete (I’m not a mod so perhaps lacking there?).

For Android: Sync is just so perfect. Feels like Reddit before it was overtaken with low-effort Facebook exiles. Boost is great as well. I know there are tons of apps for Android in particular but both of those just feel right at home for me.

PigsInClover

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Resonosity

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Sync has been my alternative coming from RiF. Very clean experience

ioslife

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Voyager for Lemmy is essentially Apollo

agent_flounder

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Lemmy has a bunch of good apps.

GONADS125

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I really like the customizability on Jerboa for Lemmy on Android. Smaller font with list view gives me strong old school Alien Blue vibes.

Edit: Here's my frontpage on Jerboa.

Fades

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I’ve been using Liftoff! app, it’s pretty good with a few bugs

Send_me_nude_girls

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Reddit, Twitter, Netflix, YouTube all in a short time enshitificated.

lemmyvore

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Oh Narwhal was still going? Relay went paywal on the 1st.

I've been using the Geddit app on Android to keep an eye on a handful of subs. It loads RSS feeds and shows them sort of like a 3rd-party app of yore. Obviously there's no participation, and it only shows a small subset of comments. But it's good for staying up to date with news and generally weaning myself off the platform.

DoctorRoxxo

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Same, got the prompt to pay for narwhal, I’m not gonna do it. Will only Reddit on a pc now.

Fades

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Man, narwhal was fucking trash, before and after the redesign. Would freeze and get stuck inside videos and posts, just awful

And now it’s pay walled lmao. I used it to follow a few communities that haven’t migrated but when I got the pop up asking me if I’d start paying in a few weeks or whatever and I said fuck your and uninstalled that piece of shit

FrostyTrichs

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I was done as soon as the Boost port was available to download. Reddit has sucked for a long time. The spez bullshit was just the last straw.

Gingerlegs

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I’ll tell ya one thing that’s changed. I deleted my posts and comments, along with my account last night after being inactive since June. Idiots

lepthesr

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Did you use a program to scrub that? I haven't been on since June, but I wouldn't mind twisting the knife a bit.

Gingerlegs

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Redact. I will say, I was on there over 11 years and it took almost 2 hours for it to wipe my comments

circuscritic

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Use ViolentMonkey/GreaseMonkey scripts in Firefox.

It will rewrite your comments with gibberish, and then deletes them automatically. Just open your reddit account comments page, turn on the script, and watch, or walk away.

Completely free.

I still use RedReader on occasion on mobile, and then every few days turn the script on from my PC, and repeat as needed

Send_me_nude_girls

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Check via Google, Reddit is known for recovering deleted comments against user consent.

Pika

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people talk about how big AI is but, It'll crash like everything else as enshittification hits. I tried to use Bing AI the other day for the first time in a few months, it didn't even let me do more then a handful of entries before locking me out saying I used too many queries in 24h. How is that supposed to be helpful to a consumer as a valid feature of you lock it down.

spark947

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Yeah, hasn't anyone else noticed that there hasn't been a single profitable product to come out of it? Even copilot is biting the dust already as they try to reduce computing costs. I also haven't heard of a single person actually paying for chatgpt access either...

filister

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spark947

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Yes, but it is not profitable for it to run like this. I would speculate that payed users are the vast minority.

zecg

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I paid 20 bucks plus VAT last week for a month of access to try the new dalle in chatgpt, it has just dropped.

stockRot

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I work in healthcare tech and can guarantee there are exciting things coming down the pipeline in that domain

spark947

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Lol. I will believe it when I see it. I don't think LLMs especially will do that much good in Healthcare, and I would be particulary wary of them diagnosing patients. Aside from some very limited signal analysis for telehealth, I am very wary on the applications of "new" AI on healthcare. I believe it will be a disaster.

stockRot

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Unless you're a medical professional, you probably won't see it.

spark947

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8f your in enterprise software, this stuff is pretty malleable. You are regularly asked to give pitches and lectures on medical projects, for sales reasons. You would be surprised - most people that work on this stuff have no idea the fist thing about medicine.

My Mom's a doctor, so I can ask her to have a bit of insight about this stuff. The challenges facing healthcare don't have that much to do with technology, at least in the US.

KinglyWeevil

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Anything you can share?

stockRot

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We're largely still working with LLMs at the moment -- Using them to immediately pull in relevant clinical information from previous encounters when a doctor sees a patient. Or using generative AI to edit doctors' messages to patients be more empathetic and... human (our pilot organizations have really loved this one so far). Using procedure codes on claims to guess if certain diagnoses were missed and to make more robust health risk profiles for populations as a whole -- these are a bit more NLP/data mining.

spark947

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Much of this seems like a bad idea imo.

azulavoir

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Hey, same (or at least similar)

bamboo

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I and many of my coworkers pay for ChatGPT. It’s super useful at work and can be used to save a considerable amount of time.

spark947

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I'm in all the business meetings. "Use Chatham to save time generating analysis" or something like that. I think it has been proven that merely using it as a tool to generate content isn't profitable- at some level even your paid subscription is subsidized by VC money. The real test is if it provides "valuable" content. But then why does your employer even need you to make the prompts? Don't worry, I believe LLMs are fundamentally incapable of this and that your job is safe.

glockenspiel

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Those companies learned their lesson from search engines. They gave it away for free for far too long and with too few strings attached. It became impossible to realistically gate features and charge for them.

But chatbots, on the other hand, just need a little big money razzle dazzle and, boom, now it is AI and people are conditioned to accept any limits thrown at them.

spark947

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Google made a very profitable ad business fromt heir search engine.

KinglyWeevil

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I get why some limits are necessary, a company doesn't want a Microsoft Tae repeat...but after Chat GPT was made available to the public, the rapid addition of a whole range of guardrails made it nearly immediately unusable.

You ask it about anything which is controversial in the slightest regard and it shuts down, which for me at least, removes any interest in using it.

popemichael

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It would be pure foolishness to trust Reddit and its management.

In the future, they will be seen by all in a somewhat similar light of failure emitted by Twitter

LainOfTheWired

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Dude this would kill the only reason I ever visit this site.

tpihkal

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Reddit: Nothing's changing. Also Reddit: It's changing.

filister

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Olap

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They 100% are. Without anyone's consent. Lemmy instances will even send all the data to your own instance's db! No scraping required even!

I haven't had a close look at lemmy.world recent TOS, but I'd be adding a revenue share clause to any posts used to train models originating from their instance's community

Draedron

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The securest way to know reddit will do something is if they claim they will not do something. Spez is constantly lying.

Erasmus

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DOOOO IT!!!!

trachemys

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Too bad builtin reddit search completely sucks.

salton

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wewbull

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If this had been what they did to start with, I'd still be there. I was always logged in

DeathWearsANecktie

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Fuck Huffman

autotldr

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

The Washington Post reported Friday that Reddit might cut off Google and force users to log in to Reddit itself to read anything if it can’t reach deals with generative AI companies to pay for its data.

The Washington Post’s report wasn’t just focused on Reddit — it’s about how more than 535 news organizations have opted to block their content from being scraped by companies like OpenAI to help train products such as ChatGPT.

According to the original report, Reddit is in negotiations with AI companies to get them to pay to use its data, and if it couldn’t strike those agreements, it might require logins to see content.

That could have the knock-on effect of preventing Reddit results from showing up in Google searches.

(In my June interview with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, he said that “we’re in talks” with AI companies about the pricing changes.

X, formerly Twitter, has also implemented new pricing tiers for accessing its API, and X owner Elon Musk blamed data scraping by AI startups as a way to justify the reading limits implemented this summer.

The original article contains 353 words, the summary contains 183 words. Saved 48%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

loki_d20

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That will never happen, it would destroy their search engine results that lead traffic to their site more than what they get from regular users.

ZeroCool

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Lol yeah, sure. Because as we all know, Reddit definitely doesn’t have a well deserved decade+ reputation for half-baked decisions and dealing self-inflicted blows to its own business.

wreckedcarzz

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Hey guys, we should let the most dedicated and toxic moderators, moderate even more with multiple subs!

Hey guys, let's like, buy an app, and like, ruin it!

Hey guys, let's redesign the site to be less space and data efficient.

Hey guys, let's roll our own video player! Who here knows anything about video players? Anyone?

Hey guys, let's add random coins and gifts and avatars and let's dive into the crypto scene! We can't lose!

Hey guys, let's go public! What could go wrong?

Hey guys, we should shun all our porn communities!

Hey guys, let's force all apps except ours to pay us or gtfo!

[you are here in the timeline]

Hey guys, let's stop showing up in Google results! Who needs search?

Hey guys, let's force logins like X!

lemmyvore

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They should ask accounts to do phone number verification! It's been working out wonderful for Twitch!

wreckedcarzz

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[a few years after that]

Hey guys, let's fake a data breach and sell all our user's personal information on the dark web!